Uncover free hand-drawn like sketches for DBAs

As you could see in my blog post as well as presentations of the last months, I use Excalidraw for drawing hand-drawn like diagrams for a while now. A colleague at work made me aware of the tool. A colleague at work made me aware of the tool. And since the first use of Excalidraw, I am thrilled.

But what is Excalidraw? It is a virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted. A perfect companion for virtual trainings, workshops and more. The tool is simple and intuitive. Within a few minutes you can create your first diagrams. There are also a number of public libraries available.

Example sketch of an Oracle DB Point in Time Recovery

The Tool

Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams. The blog post One Year of Excalidraw does provide a good overview about the technology stack behind it as well the features available. As an end user, you use Excalidraw as a web app or alternatively embedded in an application such as Visual Studio Code (Excalidraw Extension)

Below a list of the coolest features:

  • Collaboration work together on a sketch
  • Various translations
  • File system integration and file handling
  • Dark Mode
  • Encrypted Data, by using end-to-end encryption
  • Excalidraw public libraries
  • Excalicharts, Lines, Arrows, Grid and Stats and much more
  • Visual Studio Code Excalidraw Extension
Visual Studio Code with the Excalidraw Extension

OraDBA Sketches

After half a year of virtual trainings, workshops and presentations, I have been drawing a bunch of my diagrams using Excalidraw. Usually I do store them as offline files in the corresponding project folder or git repository. Nevertheless, I have a few sketches, which I use again and again. Since it is not always practical to create an Excalidraw library, I have created a GitHub repository with various sketches. With the combination of Visual Studio Code, GIT and the Excalidraw Extension, it is thus relatively easy to access existing sketches. The corresponding GitHub repository is available via oehrlis/sketches. At the moment there are sketches available for the following topics.

  • backup Sketches all around the topic of backup & recovery. Mainly backup & recovery use cases for Oracle databases.
  • libraries A couple of Excalidraw libraries which have not yet officially be published in the Excalidraw library repository.
  • misc Miscellaneous Sketches about different topic. Basically all sketches that are not or not yet stored somewhere else.
  • oci Sketches all around the topic of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) including LAB setup, Terraform and more.
  • security Sketches all around the topic of Oracle Database Security.

The sketches can be used as ideas, templates or in any other form. If you use the sketches in an official document, please include an appropriate reference / source. I would definitely appreciate any contributions to this GitHub repository, e.g. comments, stars, issues, pull requests etc.

References

Summary of the most important links and references.